The housing association overhauled its approach to planned maintenance and repairs a year ago, dramatically slimming dow the number of firms it used.

Kier Services bagged two major regional deals worth £200m over five years, in what was the largest housing maintenance award to a single contractor in 2013.

Kier is carrying out planned repairs and maintenance services across Circle’s Central and Eastern regions, with the potential to be extended for a further five.

A spokesperson from Circle Housing said: “As part of our robust contract management procedure, we issued Kier with an early warning notice for their performance on voids in our central region.

“This is standard practice for contracts of this size. We are confident that we will work in partnership to implement the improvement plan and ensure that we have the sector leading void turn-around times that we have set out to deliver.”

The new contracts were signed as part of Circle’s plan to transform the way that repairs are carried out across all of its homes.

Under the new Circle arrangement, repairs and maintenance work is now split into six lots: this means single contractors are now responsible for delivering planned or responsive repairs work in the Central, Southern or Eastern regions.

Other winners of the framework include United House, Keepmoat and Mears.

Kier refused to comment on the warning notice.